Previously I posted a few dumb ideas for sentinel builds I wanted to try this patch. I wasn’t sure what I was going to play exactly, so I just started with a leveling build and waited to see what I dropped first. I kind of assumed I’d find Phalanx and Sigeon’s first since they’re lower level items, but it took me a surprising amount of time to find my first copies of those. What I did find first was a complete Last Bear set plus a 1 LP Apogee of Frozen Light and a T6 melee cold sword to slam onto it. So I figured, why not? I’m already playing a paladin, I’ll do the FG stuff later. So I went to get the Shattered Lance from Argentus and as soon as I could weild everything I swapped my build over.
It’s been… not terrible? Like it’s not good if you compare it to a real build. It’s got a lot of tank and the damage isn’t intolerable for lower health mobs, it’s just a bit slow on bosses, but honestly not that much slower than say, my Shield Bash FG from last season. The range on the skills leaves something to be desired, so maybe I’ll try to fit a random T7 increased area somewhere, but again, it’s not much worse than shield bash was. Building around regen has been pretty comfortable as expected. In a lot of areas I can afford to just afk while looking at passives or something without worrying too much about dying.
Progression has been a bit slow going, but honestly that might just have more to do with spending a lot of time on new content and side tracks than the build itself. I was also kind of stubborn in upgrading my gear in steps. I was using Woven Flesh for crit avoid until I got to 85 for the sentinel crit reduction bases, so I was missing 30 str and some other good affixes. I’ve since made my preliminary upgrades, but as you’ll see from the planner it’s still far from optimal. (I had some really sad Runes of Havok on my gloves as you can see.) But now that I have my basic endgame setup, it feels pretty good. The extra str has given me armor cap, 2/3rds of my health pool is covered by endurance, and I regen 2/3rds of that HP every second. Because I’m using the set crafting, I get to easily crit reduction cap with the sentinel bases plus I get the less damage over time stuff. It’s only really missing block for defensive layers. I do kind of wish I could have that too, but it seems difficult when I need all the flat melee cold that I can get.
There’s an even sillier version of the build I theorycrafted where I use Mourningfrost and stack some dex for the flat cold and then I can use a shield instead of DW. Ideally Bastion of Honor (I did drop one, but not LP and it just rolled necrotic res from Nem) for the block chance from str. This would also let me use the paladin passive that gives mana regen per block chance above 50%, which would help given how expensive Judgement is. But somehow adding dex into the build on top of str and attune and then also needing to invest more into phys and cold res seems… difficult. Maybe with double red rings? 
I have, perhaps unwisely, been spending almost all of my CoF favor on unique ring prophecies. We’ll see if that bears fruit.
Anyway, enough blabing, here’s the character as it is now: https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/QbYpzD3A
As always, I’ve reached that point where I’m chewing around the edges with passive points. I’m not sure where best to allocate the remaining points. More str/attune? More health/damage? Attack speed? idk. I think if I do hit the red rings that makes some of the decisions easier. But that’s hypothetical for now.
Aside form advice on passives, the bigger question I pose is in regards to the judgement skill tree: I’ve found that even with investment into time and faith, keeping up enough mana for Pious Offering is difficult. It’s not that I can’t cast my judgement often, but with the more damage being tied to consuming current mana, it’s not getting much benefit after the first few hits of the cycle. Doesn’t matter that much for trash, but obviously on bosses this is a huge loss. So what do you think I do in this regard? Do I try to lean into mana recovery somehow to try to make Pious work better? Or do I take points out of it and redistribute them to other sources of more damage? If so, which? There are the 2 4 point conditional more damage multipliers right next to where I already path to. I’m not sure how I feel about those, but maybe boss damage is enough of my issue that just taking the boss and rare one is fine. I could try pathing over to the generic more damage and stun chance with Proclamation, but it’s 6 points to get all of that. I could also maybe take one point out of the frenzy duration though. Things would maybe get easier if I manage to find a +4 levels to judgement, but I haven’t yet and I like the idea of just filling those slots with str/attune anyway.
I also kind of wonder if I could make vengeance do more significant damage to avoid the mana issues all together, but maybe it’s just doomed to support status in this build.
There you go. I’d love some advice. I’m having a reasonable amount of fun with this and worst case I have what I need to swap to my Phalanx build if I wanted to try something else. It can make use of a lot of the same gear minus the attunement, and end that I could take a bit of advantage of if I took the node that gives armor applying to DoT based on attunement until I made more appropriate gear. Assuming I do keep going with this, I’ll probably make a final update when I reach/kill Abberoth. I’ll be curious to see how it compares to the shield bash build from last season. It’s gonna be missing a lot of hit damage reduction from block, so idk if it’ll be able to just tank most of his attacks or not, but it should be a lot smoother whenever I have to run around in void puddles. Unfortunately it won’t be a perfect comparison since they made him easier this patch. Also boss fights in general should go SO much smoother for all Sentinels now that Volatile Reversal is no more.
